January 2013: Pak troops have illegally entered Jammu & Kashmir, killed two Indian soldiers and taken away their heads. Even as the external affairs ministry steps in to protest the brutal killing, down south in Belgaum on the Karnataka-Maharashtra border, Hindutva figure and Sri Rama Sena founder Pramod Mutalik is breathing fire.

In a public meeting, Mutalik mentions a figure, claiming that many Hindus had been killed in the valley by the Pak-trained terrorists. Later, when a journalist asks him for the source for this figure, Mutalik replies that he will increase the number at his next meeting, and it is up to the government to come up with the correct figure.

Mutalik is no stranger to inflammatory speeches — and he keeps making them with little regard to facts so long as it suits his ideology, says a Belgaum resident who has watched the Hindu activist for four decades now.

It was much worse earlier, according to him. In his younger days, the now 59-year-old Belgaumborn, unmarried Mutalik campaigned in his hometown, asking people not to patronize shops run by Muslims, or use the private buses owned by them.

Such extremism in ideologies, beliefs and ways contributed — along with the sheer wave of protests that followed, including from party stalwarts — to a pro-Hindu party like BJP dropping him like a hot potato last Sunday hours after the party roped him in.

Whilst the local BJP Dharwad unit saw merit in Mutalik, the BJP Delhi leadership clearly reckoned he was a relic from the past and a liability.

Unwittingly, the Congress too committed a blunder of a similar nature a day later in Mangalore when it admitted a Mutalik associate, Dinker Shetty, into the party before duly expelling him within a few hours.

Shetty was among the men involved in the infamous attack on women in a pub in Mangalore in 2009.

The Mutalik-led team carried it out in the name of protecting the traditional Indian values and the honour of Indian women. Mutalik floated Sri Rama Sena in 2006, and has set up its branches in neighbouring Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, besides one in West Bengal.

"I don't remember when I joined RSS because when I was born my father was already an active RSS worker," says Mutalik who has studied up to 12th standard.

Spurned by BJP, a defiant Mutalik will now contest the Lok Sabha elections from the Dharwad constituency and Bangalore South — where he will take on BJP national general secretary Ananth Kumar (as well as Congress' Nandan Nilekani). In Dharwad, Mutalik goes head to head with state BJP chief Prahlad Joshi.

"In the past, BJP cheated me, now they have insulted me by cancelling my membership. I will be fighting not just BJP, but also the Congress and JD(S) candidates," Mutalik says, banking purely on the right-wing votes, and threatening to eat into Joshi's votes.

Political analysts also see this as a blackmail tactic by the Hindu hardliner to arm-twist BJP into submission. "He is misguiding youth in the name of the religion," says Shivarudra Krishna Kallolikar, a professor of history at Karnatak University in Dharwad.

"And if sections of youth are behind him, it is because they're unemployed." The Ayodhya movement two decades ago spawned a number of rightwing reactionary outfits, many of which became dormant after their founders realized their personal ambitions, points out Kallolikar. The country's changing demographic makes Mutalik's task of realizing his own aspirations more difficult by the day.